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Friday, December 04, 2015

For Rational Production

The modern market society that we call capitalism have
brought all the historic problems of economic exploitation to a head. No government
will ever take the radical steps needed to reverse the ecological crisis if
this is against capitalist interests. It is all too common these days to single
out either population growth or technology — or both — to blame for the
ecological problems that beset us. But we cannot single out either of these as
“causes” of problems whose most deep-seated roots actually lie in the market
economy. Attempts to focus on these supposed “causes” deceptively shift our
focus from the social issues we must resolve. The whole system of production
and distribution must be transformed, and this can be done only by establishing
socialism, i.e. the common ownership and democratic planning of the economy
that takes into account the preservation of the ecological balance. Society
itself, and not a small oligarchy of property-owners nor an elite of
techno-bureaucrats will be able to choose, democratically, what is produced and
prioritized. Products and services will be distributed free of charge,
according to the will and needs of the citizens. Far from being by nature
“despotic,” planning is the exercise by a whole society of its freedom: the
freedom to make decisions. Under capitalism use-value is only a means — often a
trick — at the service of exchange-value and profit—which explains, by the way,
why so many products in the present society are substantially useless—in a
planned socialist economy the use-value is the only criterion for the
production of goods and services, with far reaching economic, social, and
ecological consequences. As the eco-socialist writer, Joel Kovel, observed,
“The enhancement of use-values and the corresponding restructuring of needs
becomes now the social regulator of technology rather than, as under capital,
the conversion of time into surplus value and money.”

Socialist planning is based on the principle of a democratic
debate on all the levels where decisions are to be taken: different
propositions are submitted to the concerned people, delegates elected at the
local, regional and global level. What guarantee is there that the people will
make the correct ecological choices, even at the cost of giving up some of
their habits of consumption? There is no such “guarantee,” other than rest upon
the rationality of democratic decisions, once the power of commodity fetishism
is broken. This does not mean that conflicts will not arise between the
requirements of protecting the environment and social needs, between the
ecological imperatives and the necessity of developing basic infra-structures.
A classless society is not a society without disagreements. These are
inevitable: it will be the task of democratic planning in a socialist society,
liberated from the imperatives of capital and profit-making, to solve them,
through open discussion, leading to decision-making by society itself. Such a
grassroots and participatory democracy is the only way, not to avoid errors,
but also to collectively self-correct its own mistakes.

Socialism is only an objective possibility, not the
inevitable result of the contradictions of capitalism or of the “iron laws of
history.” One cannot predict the future. However, we can be sure that in the
absence of the socialist transformation, the inherent logic of capitalism will
lead the planet to ecological disaster, threatening the health and the life of
billions of human beings, and perhaps even the survival of our species. There
is no reason for optimism. The ruling class is incredibly powerful, and the
forces of the socialist opposition still infinitesimally small. But it is the
only hope that the catastrophic course of capitalist “growth” will be halted.